


Quenched in Leaves the Leaping Sun

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess [10]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 03:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17758724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: "It was because of Endeavour that Bixby came to associate Valentine's Day with birdsong."It's Valentine's Day 2019, and Joss Bixby takes a winter walk in the woods.





	Quenched in Leaves the Leaping Sun

It was because of Endeavour that Bixby came to associate Valentine's Day with birdsong.

“The feast of St. Valentine’s,” Endeavour said, “began to be seen as a special time for lovers partly because it fell in mid-February, right at the time when the birds begin to look for their mates. You know, like that old line out of Chaucer? From the Parliament of Fowls, written in the 1380s?"

 

_"For this was on Saint Valentines’ Day, when every bird cometh to choose his mate."_

 

Oh, yes, of course.

 

But today, the song of the birds was just the balm Bixby’s soul needed.

Sometimes, striding through the frost-filled forest, it’s almost like a pain, an ache, the realization of all the things that he should have done differently.

He never should have gone to that courthouse, for one. Endeavour had been right on that score. But then, Endeavour always did seem to know about things like that. 

*******

It wasn’t long after they came home from their second trip to Oxford when Endeavour had to run up to Paris, and, for the first time ever, was three hours late coming home. Bixby thought that, at last, he had left his fears behind, that he had stopped and chatted with acquaintances from the publishing house, perhaps went out for a late lunch.

Instead, Endeavour came home looking shaken. He headed straight for the Scotch, downing first one, and then in quick succession, another.

“That was awful,” he said, his voice trembling. “That was bloody awful.”

Bixby stood in the doorway, perplexed, until Endeavour’s nerves were steady enough to tell him what had happened.

It made no sense: on the case back in Oxford, he had reeled quotes right off of the top of his head, like a walking anthology of Western literature. How was it possible that he should have gotten lost on his way home from Paris, a trip he had made countless times before?

Bixby chalked it up to his habit of listening to the radio as he drove; he had been distracted, missed a turn somewhere, that was all.

 

Although, it was true, that more and more often, Bix noticed him writing things down in his notebooks. But he was, of course, a writer. That was what he did.

 

Endeavour was all right.

********

By his mid forties, Endeavour's hair had gone completely, prematurely silver, and he began to adopt a more austere demeanor, in what Bixby recognized was a form of defense.

It was as if he had realized that the eccentricities that might be excused in the flush of youth were somehow beneath his dignity now that his hair had gone from gold-vermillion autumn to bright winter—now, he learned to take greater pains to conceal his bouts of confusion and forgetfulness under sharp blue eyes and a chiseled, imperious face.

 

But when he was with those he loved, around Bixby or around Esme’s and Guillaume’s children, for example, he swerved in somewhat the opposite direction; he seemed slightly more open to things, more prone to let down his guard—even to the point of occasionally listening to pop music on the car radio.

 

 

“This Buzz person’s lyrics aren’t half bad,” he said one afternoon. “Maybe you might buy me his album, next time you’re out.”

Bixby laughed. “I would, if only I knew who ‘Buzz’ is. Besides, why don’t you buy it yourself?”

Endeavour colored at that, and it was only then that Bixby realized Endeavour considered going into the pop section of the record store as something slightly indecent—that he had asked Bix to buy it just as a young woman might ask her bolder friend to pop into the chemist's and buy her a packet of French letters.

Well, he’d simply have to give him more to go on, or brave the record store himself, that was all.

And then, one day, a revelation.

“I heard the oddest thing,” he said. “This Buzz person used to be with the police, just as I was. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

“The police?” Bixby asked in wonderment.

As with so many things Endeavour said, Bixby had to turn this over his in his mind until the light struck in just the right angle.

Ah.

“Are you sure this ‘Buzz person’ isn’t called Sting?”

Endeavour looked at Bixby as though he were a genius. “Yes, I think that was it, actually.”

And thus, one gathered that Endeavour considered the lyrics of Sting to be marginally acceptable.

 

Esme and Guillaume’s children came to adore him; he had a knack of speaking to them naturally, as if they were his equals, that they seemed especially to appreciate.

 When Elise had gone through a phase of devouring Enid Blyton storybooks, she became convinced that the woods around their house might be the perfect home for Chinky the Pixie and for Moon Face and for Sparkle the Fairy and all of her favorite characters. Nothing would do but for Endeavour to go with her to find them.

“We might find them,” he conceded. “Please just don’t be disillusioned if it’s all a fraud.”

Bixby had been stunned at that; certainly, that wasn’t the sort of thing to tell children?  But Elise only laughed as if she quite agreed, and then ran off for her coat.  

 

And it was a fine thing, too, that they took to him so. As for himself, Bixby wasn’t sure what to do with the children until they got old enough to learn to play cards.

Endeavour had looked concerned at first, and Bixby thought that perhaps he didn’t approve of him teaching them such bad habits, lest he set them on a course straight from thirty-one in the dining room to five-card stud in Vegas.  But then Bixby realized what the true trouble was: he was afraid to try to play.

Endeavour hesitated for a moment.

Then, he said, “I’ll just be on your team.”

 

And it worked out well. It became a tradition of theirs, especially over the Christmas holidays.  Bixby had a vague idea that it was considered kind to let children win now and then, to encourage them, but somehow, Bix couldn’t bring himself to let himself lose.

God, he was a bastard sometimes. Was he really that competitive?

Endeavour sitting by his side, however, helped to even the playing field a bit, gave the kids a bit of a chance and made it rather more of a fun challenge for Bixby.

“I wouldn’t bother saving spades if I were you,” Endeavour would announce to the table at large. Or, when Bixby drew a card, he’d blurt out, “Oh, we got the ten of hearts. That’s good, isn’t it?”  

 

The first Wednesday that Endeavour put out a red tie instead of a blue one, his heart sank a bit. But it was all right. Red was more his color anyway. He was, after all, a dramatic winter. Maybe Endeavour had come to understand that.

 

Bixby didn’t say a word about it. And, fair was fair. Endeavour hadn’t said anything the other night, when he was lying on the carpet listening to records and had reached up to thread his fingers through his, to pull him down alongside him.

“Do you think . . . do you think we might go upstairs?” Bixby had asked.

“Why?” Endeavour murmured, already pressing his lips to his.

“My back is . . . well . . .” 

Endeavour drew back. “All right,” he said.

 

In 1989, Bixby even got him to go on a trip north, to Amsterdam to that blasted Rijksmuseum, to see that paining.

The real one.

Endeavour protested at first. He was definitely keen on maintaining his routine. “I’ve already seen the thing. I told you,” he said. But he went along anyway.

They stood in the museum in front of the painting, the original of the copy that Bixby had bought years ago.

  
“There.” Endeavour said. “Here’s the real one. Does it live up to your expectations?”

“Are you sure it’s the real one?”

“Yes,” Endeavour said, the impatience clear in his voice. He seemed to be under the impression that once Bix saw the painting, they would get straight back in the car and go home.  

“I just thought I’d owed it to you. To make it up to you a bit. You know, for being less than honest with you when we first met.”

Endeavour snorted at that. “Less than honest? I suppose you might say that, yes, considering you didn’t tell me your name for three years. Why do you even want to bring that up for, now? Why does it matter?”

“Because I want things to be square with us, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to take me to Amsterdam for that. Can we go home now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity?”

“We could,” Bixby said. “Or we could go to Denmark.”

“Why? Why would I want to go to Denmark of all places?” 

Bixby reached over and pretended to pull something out of Endeavour’s pocket, in one of the same slight-of-hand tricks he used to pull on him when they sat on the dock back at Lake Silence. Then, he placed it in Endeavour’s hand, curling his fingers shut. Endeavour looked at him for a moment, perplexed, and then opened his palm to reveal two gold bands.

“What’s this?’ Endeavour asked.

“What do you think it is?” Bixby asked.

Honestly, even Endeavour couldn’t be that obtuse.

“What?” Bixby asked. “Are you going to make me go down on one knee?”

Endeavour turned away, as though embarrassed, though he smiled faintly too, as if he thought the idea rather funny. 

“Fine then,” Bixby said, starting to descend. But Endeavour whipped around and grasped his arm, casting anxious looks about the hall as he struggled to drag Bixby back upright.

“Don’t,” he hissed, dragging him up to his feet, but laughing, too—that laugh that was like water lapping against the dock in Oxfordshire. “Don’t!”

After he got him back on his feet, Endeavour looked at him uncertainly and said, “It’s all ridiculous. I don’t see why you would want to make such a fuss over this. Why do we need some piece of paper to tell us what we know? You’re a damned traditionalist, that’s all. Must be your southern roots.”

Bixby could hardly suppress a laugh at that. “Oh, that’s it certainly. I’m a traditionalist, all right.”

 

But then Endeavour went along just the same.

Which was a bit of a relief. It would have been terribly embarrassing to have lost face like that, after all those years.

And besides, with a legal union between them, perhaps Endeavour need never find out he had forged his name a dozen times back in 1970.

*******

“Well, I’m sorry,” Endeavour said, stonily facing the blank white wall. “If I had known I’d ever have any one I’d hate to leave, I would never have stayed in that warehouse that winter.”

Bixby just shook his head. There were far more likely culprits responsible for the state Endeavour was in in Bixby’s opinion—but, for some reason, he persisted in blaming everything on a winter he had once spent living in an unheated warehouse, a winter that Bixby had never once heard mentioned in more than thirty years of knowing him.  

Bixby ran his hands through his hair. It was all a disaster.  On the outside, he was as slender and straight and sturdy as a silver birch tree in winter. But, it seemed, he was slowly crumbing within. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia, but, soon enough, test after test revealed an avalanche of problems. His liver was a wreck, his heart.

In hospital, it was more difficult for him to rely on his little tricks of routine, and the nurses noticed quickly enough how often he would forget what they had told him not ten minutes before. An MRI was ordered, the results of which left the doctors baffled—they couldn’t understand why the images should show damage more in line with what one would expect from a professional boxer than a sedentary poet, until Bixby explained he had once been in the army and the police.

 He said nothing about prison; he didn’t want to color their attitude toward him now that he was dependent on their help.

 They seemed to accept this answer, but one of the doctors, he was sure, looked at him askance. But then he shook his head, as if dismissing the thought.

**************

“I don’t want any fuss,” he said. “I don’t have any time for those comforting fictions.”

“All right. That’s fine, then,” Bixby said, even though it irritated him no end when Endeavour said such things. What about me? Bixby had wanted to say. What am I supposed to do? Put you in the ground as if you never mattered?

 

And, unlike Endeavour, he knew all too well where to place the blame for this.

On one particularly long and trying day, Bixby could no longer hide it, his anger at the injustice of it all. He had to say it.

 

“In 2017, I will go to that courthouse,” he said, as if picking up a conversation they had had thirty years ago in the Thursdays’ spare bedroom. “I’ll go and burn everything in those files to ashes.”

Endeavour’s eyes grew round at that, making him look suddenly years younger, as if he, too, was transported back in time.

“You can’t. You can’t do that,” he said.

“The hell I can.”

The pure terror on Endeavour’s face caused Bix instantly to regret his words, to regret opening that box. “You can’t,” Endeavour said, grabbing his upper arms in both hands, as though Bixby was thinking of going right then, seventeen years too early, and Endeavour meant to restrain him.

“Oh God! You can’t do that! You told me you wouldn’t,” and then he was shouting, bursting with an incoherent torrent of words until Bixby promised him he wouldn’t go near the place. Only then did words return, although they were all incomprehensible; it was as if he couldn’t breathe properly.

“Don’t go back there,” he said.

“All right,” Bixby said. “I won’t.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes, yes,” Bixby said. Although at that point, he would have said anything to calm him.

Endeavour stilled at that—but then he turned and said, still gasping to catch his breath, “But you will. You will. It’s like watching a peacock in a tiger’s cage. Oh, God.” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and shuddered. “Why did I ever say that?  There must have been something in that wine. It’s unforgivable. Why, why, why?”

 

What was he talking about? Wasn’t it lemonade that had been spiked all those years ago?

 

Bixby was relieved when the nurse came in and adjusted his IV, giving him a sedative. But then, there was something awful about that too, the way he stared at the wall, his big eyes a blank, eyes that were usually redolent with rolling expressions like clouds moving across a summer blue sky.

Staring thus, it was like he was already a world away from him.

 

Bixby tried to reach him, to assure him it would be all right, but Endeavour only looked at him, blinking in confusion, and said, “I can’t hear you.”

 

From then on, the nurses didn’t even try to make him go home. It was imperative that he stay, that Endeavour say something else to him, anything else.  “Can I have a glass of water?” Or “What day is today?”

 

Anything other than, “I can’t hear you.”

 

That his last words to him might mirror his first, bring their love into a circle that had gone nowhere, was unthinkable.

 

Bixby dozed for a while in his chair, and when he woke, his heart lightened, leapt under his ribs. Endeavour was much better—he was sitting up and working a crossword. He looked all right. Better than all right, really. The antibiotics must be working then, must have finally kicked in.

He was filling in each square with a bold flourish of his pen. So what if he might not remember where the hell he left his coat? He certainly could figure out all of those esoteric clues and baffling puns quickly enough. He was fine. It had all just been a scare.  

Endeavour, noticing him stir, looked at him with concern. “I didn’t know whether to wake you or to let you sleep. You should go home for a while. I think you look more knackered that I must.”

“I’m all right,” Bixby said, rubbing his neck.  

Endeavour looked at him for a long moment. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. Then he hesitated. “You should tell someone, you know.”  

“Tell them what?”

“Your name. There should be someone who knows.”

“Hmmmm,” Bixby said, noncommittally.

“Will you? I don’t like to think of you alone here with no one knowing.”

Bixby couldn’t imagine why he would say such a thing now, now that it was clear he was getting better. “I won’t be alone. I’ll be with you, won’t I?” Bixby asked.  

Endeavour looked at him uncertainly, almost fearfully.  “I suppose,” he said finally. “I suppose that could . . .” Then he shrugged. “Well, who knows? You always were right about the most important things.”

 

Well, what was that supposed to mean?

And, more to the point, when did Endeavour think he was right about anything?

 

“But will you tell someone else, too? Just the same?” Endeavour asked.

Bixby was too tired to argue. He rubbed his eyes. “That’s fine, then.”

“Will you really? Or are you just saying that to humor me?”

“Yes, yes,” Bixby said, still rubbing his eyes. “Sure.”

 

A furrow creased Endeavour’s brow. “You should go home. I’m not afraid here anymore. I feel awful, that I made you sleep in that chair.”

He hadn’t done any such thing but . . .

 

“I’ll stay until you fall asleep. How’s that?”

“All right,” Endeavour said, and his face relaxed, shifting from bravado to gratitude. He tossed the crossword onto the bedside table and sunk back down, resting his head on the pillow. Then he reached for one of Bixby’s hands, folding it within his own, and bringing it up to rest on his chest, right above his heart.

“Do you remember that night, a long time ago? We were in the woods,” Endeavour said.

Bixby smiled. “I think you might have to be a bit more specific than that.”

“You said that everything had all been worth it. That you’d do it all again.”

“Hmmm,” Bixby said. “Yes, I remember.”

“I think so, too. I mean, I would,” Endeavour said. “I would.”

Bixby brushed the hair back from his face. It wasn’t at all like him to be so maudlin.  “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. He closed his eyes and smiled. “Night, Bix,” he said.

“Night, Josephine.”

Endeavour quirked another smile at that, at that half-forgotten joke, and then, his breathing deepened and evened, into the familiar cadences of sleep.

Bixby closed his eyes, too. He should get up, he knew. His back was killing him. But somehow, he couldn’t rouse himself, couldn’t summon the energy to stir from the chair. . . . and . . .

 

And at first, Bixby thought that there must be something wrong with the damn machine—that incessant, screeching beep would be sure to wake Endeavour. He didn’t understand why a nurse would rush in the door, when Endeavour was fine, his eyes softly closed, his hand still holding his as if he hadn’t meant to let go, the trace of the smile still on his face.

 

*****

He broke his first promise right away. Of course, he was going to have a funeral. It was impossible that he should just wake up the next morning, pick out his own tie, and go on as if nothing had ever happened.

Surely, Endeavour would understand that about him, his need to mark events with some sort of fanfare?  Otherwise, how could he understand that the worst had, indeed, happened? How could he go on?

The second promise—well, that had just been an inevitability that couldn’t be avoided. As soon as there was a stone on the ground reading _Endeavour_ _Morse_ _1938_ — _2000_ ,the disciples came, leaving flowers and candles and their own cracks at poetry. Bixby felt it was only a matter of time before some eccentric poetry lover bought the plot next to his.

 

After the Wildwood debacle, Endeavour had grown increasingly suspicious of strangers. It would irritate him no end, stuck for eternity next to someone he did not know, who he might even feel was cause for suspicion.

So he bought up the plot and ordered a stone. Joss Bixby 1935—. With the date to be filled in, with. . ..

Well, whatever the hell the date would be.

 

The first time he saw the thing, he felt a stir in his conscience, a slight twinge of regret—he had told Endeavour he would tell the truth at the end, but instead, he had inscribed that name in stone. Well. It was too late, now.

He had lived with that name for years.

And now, he’d die with it.

It was all right, he told himself. But when his eyes drifted over to the hyphen on his stone, his heart sank.

That hyphen.

That hyphen seemed to reach into all eternity.

**********

But he wasn’t as lonely as he would have imagined. Because it turned out he _was_ right about the most important things. Endeavour was there with him, always.

He was there in the warmth he felt each year at the first snow, in the memory of Endeavour lining up fir cones for squirrels. He was in the sound of water, in the scent of leaves, in the flash of a red-gold finches’ wings in the hedgerow. And he was there in the memories of Esme and Guillaume’s children, now grown. When they came at Christmas, they would sit and play cards, and one would invariably say, “You shouldn’t bother collecting hearts, all the good ones are gone now,” in Endeavour’s Lincolnshire French, and they’d all laugh, temporarily children again.

And, of course, they proclaimed everything remotely unsatisfactory—be it an IKEA instruction book to an irritating iPhone update—as a torture worthy of a ring of Dante’s Inferno.

In the evenings, Bixby would sit on the sofa with his Scotch, and he could feel it, Endeavour’s presence—so much so that it was a shock sometimes to look down, to see that blank stretch of ornate Persian carpet, so keenly had he felt that Endeavour was there, sprawled across the floor, all arms and legs and wild red-gold hair, his eyes gently closed as they had been at the end, listening to the song.

_Let me be to thee as a circling bird._

Endeavour was still somewhere about, just slightly out of sight. 

Once, Bixby had stood stalk still in a dark wood and Pagan found him, circling through the trees. Once, Endeavour had managed to come back to him all the way from Scotland, following birds south. Wherever Endeavour was now, he would come back for him again, just as he had always done.

Bixby was certain of it.

And Bixby was a man who knew how to wait.

************

And then, there it was, the unimaginable year. 2017.

That the evidence of what had felled Endeavour should remain, while he himself had been long, so long, gone was anathema. Nothing would do but that he go.

Endeavour would understand.

*********

In the anteroom of the records department, he sat waiting on a bench, holding a silver-topped walking stick. Not that he needed the damn thing--but it gave him an air of gravitas, made him, despite his age, less easy to dismiss.

He had once been the center of attention at every party. But to be an old man, Bix had learned, was to be nearly invisible.

 Across the way, on another bench, another man sat waiting, a man who looked to be about his age. There was something familiar about him, but he couldn’t quite place it. And then, after a while, he noticed the man looking at him, too, as if he felt the same way.

**************

They looked through the records in silence. Dear God. It was sickening. That was the only word for it. He could feel the bile rising bitter in the back of his throat, burning as he swallowed. A father, even? His own daughter? Never in his wildest moments of conjecture had he even been capable of imaging anything quite like this. He felt ill, somehow corrupted, just by going through the papers.

He hated to impose on the man’s privacy, but he had to ask.  

“Do you know if there’s anyone else? Who might need to see this?”

“No,” the man said heavily. “They’ve all since died. I was the youngest. And one of the luckier ones. I got the chance for a new life, you see.”

Bixby looked at him, the question evidently clear on his face, for the man said, simply, “America.  It's a wide big country. A place where a man can make himself entirely anew.  Ever been there?”

“Yes,” Bixby said quietly. “Long time ago now. What took you there, might I ask?" 

"Hope," the man said. 

Bixby looked at him, one eyebrow raised. That was certainly a poetical answer, one supposed. 

"My wife," the man clarified. "She's American. Her name is Hope." 

"Ah," Bixby said. 

 

Bixby flipped over the third set of papers, unable to read anymore. And then, there it was: a mug shot of Endeavour— Endeavour, holding a placard and looking with a dreadful, self-righteous certainty into the camera, with a fierceness of expression unlike any Bixby had seen him wear in all of the years he knew him.

This, he realized with a pang, must be the last photo taken of him before they met.

He slipped the photo into his pocket.  

The other man raised his heavy, dark brows at that. And then, something in his expression shifted, as if he had fitted a puzzle piece into place.

“Where’s Morse?” he asked.

Morse. He knew him, then, from this photo. Perhaps a former colleague?

 

And then the flash of a memory of a London gala, of Pagan, wild-haired, three sheets to the wind, sitting gloomily at a table.

“Who’s that man?” Bixby asked.

“A former colleague.” Pagan said dismissively, before taking a sip of his Scotch. “That bastard,” he seethed. “It’s none of his business.”

 

And then, another memory, of the last time they had visited the Thursdays, of Endeavour sitting at another table, his hair cropped and silver. "It's odd that Jakes and I both married Americans, isn't it?" Endeavour said, and poor Fred Thursday's lined face contorted into the very picture of puzzlement. 

 

Bixby wasn’t quite sure who the man was, or what it was that had once passed between him and Endeavour, but the man had said the one syllable of a name with such gentleness that Bixby answered truthfully.

“Well,” he said. “He died, actually.”

“Oh,” the man said, quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Bixby said.  “It was a long time ago now.”

The man flinched at that. But why should he look so pained? It certainly wasn’t any bit of his fault.

“Well, Bixby said. If there’s no one else, I’m taking this and burning it.”

In an instant, the man’s face shifted from sorrow to terror. “You can’t do that.”

It was still there, in the man’s face, after all of these years. The fear of going against authority. Not just one of the officers on this case, then. He must have been one of these kids. The damage done by these bastards just seemed to go on and on. It was not to be borne. He'd see to it that the very memory of these men would be utterly annihilated. 

“I think you’ll find that I can, old man,” Bixby said.

 

*****************

Bixby sat on a garden bench by the stone ring where they held bonfires in autumn, watching the flames die from gold vermillion to blue black embers.

Endeavour was right. He never should have gone to Britain.

There had always been something about Endeavour that made him seem so much younger than he, Bix, was—much younger than the actual three years that separated their ages. A certain lost, hesitant, but expectant, hopeful quality.

But after that day, somehow, if felt as if Endeavour had leapt ahead of him, that Endeavour was older than he was, that he had always been older, that he had seen into the darkness of things, that he knew things of which he, Bix, had not the slightest inkling.

It seemed ridiculous for a man of 82 to suddenly lose his innocence, an innocence that Endeavour had lost long ago at 28. Or even before that, possibly.

 But there you are.

Suddenly, his entire relationship with Endeavour seemed to rotate on its axis. He had always seen himself as shepherding Endeavour through life, but now, he realized, in Endeavour’s mind, he had been the one shepherding him.

He remembered a party at Oxfordshire, sitting at the table playing cards with Belborough, McKinnon, and Harry Rose, and Endeavour watching him from across the room, his eyes bright and watchful. Not just with desire, as he thought at the time, but with a protective glimmer of alarm.

“It’s like watching a peacock in a tiger’s cage,” he had wailed at the hospital.

At the time, he thought we was simply feverish, irrational.

 

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

 

As Bixby watched the dying black embers, he felt as if some spark had gone cold within him. He felt old, suddenly—a heaviness settled on his heart, that sounded like a whisper. Had Endeavour known, then? That he would feel this way, if he knew the extent of the horror of it all? If he knew that even their very meeting hinged on such suffering? That this was, in fact, the way in which fate stumbled, blindly and sometimes cruelly along?

 It was most assuredly so.

 

“I don’t need any comforting fictions,” Endeavour had said.

And yet, all the way to the end of his strength, he fought to ensure that Bixby would spend the rest of his days wrapped in a thick blanket made of exactly that.

 

 ****************

 

He felt it then, the weight of a long loneliness. He had become one of the moons of Saturn, orbiting through rings made of shards of ice and regret.

 

They had all been right, that was the galling, part: Tony and Sylvie and that overbearing pathologist. He should have insisted he get help sooner. But then, Endeavour was always so stubborn. He should have encouraged him to dial back on the Scotch. But then, sometimes, it seemed like there was nothing else that so settled his nerves.

He had tried, after all, hadn’t he?

 

And then, they came back and haunted him, too, all those times he had snapped at him, lost his patience.

 

There was the day he had driven halfway back to Paris because Endeavour had left his notebook at a restaurant.

“Bix, you can turn around, now,” Endeavour said quietly, after an hour.

Bixby sighed. “No. It’s fine.”  

“No, I mean. You can. I found it. It was in my bag the whole time. I just . . . “

Bixby said nothing, but only took a deep, dramatic breath as if he were a martyr, the very patron saint of patience. He hit the brakes, bringing the car to a halt, and made a turn right in the middle of the road, changing gears with much more force than was necessary.

“I’m sorry,” Endeavour said miserably.

“It’s fine,” Bixby said. But his voice was full of ice.

It's fine, he had said. But he knew he was making Endeavour feel like hell.

 

Then, there was that time he bought Endeavour some new shoes, and he failed day after day to recognize them as his.

“Where did I get these shoes?”

“I bought them for you.”

“Oh, that was nice of you. Thank you.”

The next day, it was the same. “Where did I get these shoes?” It went on and on until Bixby couldn’t take anymore, his patience snapping like a brittle branch.

“You don’t have to keep thanking me for the goddamned shoes! Just put them on and be done with it.”  

 

Endeavour blinked at him, confused. “Why are you so angry? Perhaps you should have some lunch.”

 A response which, at the time, seemed to be adding insult to injury, but which now made him twitch his mouth in a smile. 

Ah.

All those little failures.

And "I thought everyone called it the Plough.” And I’m sorry, Endeavour.

 

If Endeavour was anywhere now, he’d be whole again—perhaps an entirely different person than Bixby ever knew—the insolent and invincible constable in that mug shot he had put in his pocket. Why would such a man want a fraud like him?

 

Bixby came to feel as if there had been a gold thread linking them, even in death, and Bix had been pulling it, worrying at it, testing it, and now, it was on the verge of snapping. Too much time had passed. He couldn’t quite remember the sound of his voice. Pieces of poetry no longer popped unbidden into his head. Endeavour was slowly drifting away from him.

 

 

But in the woods traces of Endeavour remained.

In the woods, the crack of a stick beneath his feet might almost be the footstep of someone just behind him, striding along and stopping to pick up a fir cone or to locate the source of a bird call.

_My heart in hiding stirred for a bird._

And there it would be, once again. A soft memory of a love he thought he had forgotten.

*****************

And today, on Valentines’ Day, in the midst of slowly awakening birdsong, he feels it more than ever; he can almost imagine Endeavour right here, walking with him, if only he would turn and look.

And then, he can’t resist the pull. He does turn, and Endeavour is there, as slender as a silver birch tree in winter. And then, it must be some trick of the light, because, in that instant, the sun is somehow stronger than a February sun—it’s warm and liquid and gold. In that light, it easy to imagine his hair turning back from silver to gold vermillion; in that light, the lines of his austere face soften, until he stands as Endeavour as he first knew him.

 

For a moment, Joss’ breath is stolen away. And he realizes with a lurch that he hadn’t done what Endeavour had asked—He had broken all of his last promises to him.

It seemed incredible that Endeavour should have come back all this way, after all this time. He shouldn’t have bothered. Not for someone like him.

He tries to explain, to tell Endeavour that he had made a mistake. I was never any good for you, he wants to say. I’m smoke and mirrors. They were right, all of them. You should have listened.

 But Endeavour only smiles at him fondly. And he looks just as he did on the day Joss first saw him, at that party in Oxfordshire, standing in the lights, shining with a light that is warmer than the light of a February sun, a light more like a summer sun, a light that quenches in leaves the leaping sun, and in that light, Endeavour’s eyes are more luminous than even he remembered, almost as bright as the gateway into some other world.

Endeavour reaches up to rest his long, narrow hands on his shoulders, and they are warm and real, and he’s the real, warm weight beside him. And suddenly, Joss is no longer alone.

And then Endeavour says them: the first words he had ever spoken to him, a lifetime ago.

“I can’t hear you,” he murmurs gently, and then stops his protests with a kiss.

 


End file.
